My decision to buy a new iPod was made on the back of a debit card receipt (symbolic eh?) over a cup of coffee. This is what my ‘mind-map’ looked like:

As you can probably make out from the scribble above, I was leaning towards an iPod nano. The 16 GB model has been rather late in India and at the time of my purchase wasn’t available in all colors. Of the colors that were available, I liked the Blue one but I was afraid that I’ll ultimately tire of it.

I eventually settled for black and haven’t regretted the decision yet! This is what the package comes with:

iPod nano, Quick Start guide, USB/chargin cable, white earphones dock adapter and yes two Apple logo stickers (not in the picture above).

The iPod nano rests inside the box, attached to two ends of a thin plastic strip. Taking the ‘bundle’ out and pressing the strip at the two ends causes the strip to bend and the iPod nano to come out. Not the most straight forward of packaging designs but the little graphic behind the plastic sheet does help.

Open an iPod nano from Deepak Gulati on Vimeo.

iPod nano is solidly built. The shiny stainless steel back from the previous generation is gone and has been replaced by the new curved aluminum and glass construction. This is a good thing as it is much less prone to picking fingerprints and scratches. The glass does pick fingerprints easily but they are equally easily wiped off with a lint-free cloth (I recommend 3M’s scratch free wipes which are now readily available in India).

Besides being unbelievably thin, the iPod nano is also incredibly light. At about 36 grams or so you hardly feel it even if it’s resting in your hand! You could dangle it off the other end of your headphone cable and it wouldn’t fall off.

I found the screen on the new iPod nano bright and crisp. The black border around the screen sure makes videos and pictures pop. The sound quality is satisfactory but the bundled white earbuds are a letdown. Also, although the scroll wheel is quite responsive, using it on a fully loaded 16 GB iPod nano with hundreds of albums in a little painful.

So far I’ve found the addition of accelerometer somewhat gimmicky. I hardly use Cover Flow and was glad that the new firmware (1.0.3) added an option to turn it off (Settings > General > Rotate > Cover Flow (set to Off)). The videos always play landscape anyway (irrespective of the orientation of the device). While ’shake to shuffle’ works fine, it is again one of those features that I find little reason to use. May be we’ll see some interesting games that exploit the accelerometer like games on iPod touch and iPhone do. I guess a year of iPod touch usage has spoiled me!

Overall I am quite happy with Apple’s latest iteration of iPod nano. It is no iPod touch, but then this time I was in the market for a portable music player and not a one-device-does-it-all; and Apple hasn’t let me down.

Related Post:
Pricing and availability of iPods in India

This entry was posted Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Review, iPod. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.